Cookbooks pop up like toadstools these days – more than 1,000 are published every year. But as our libraries grow and our palates broaden, how do we decide what to cook?

For Julie Powell, a 29-year-old secretary in Queens, the choice was fearsome in its simplicity. In 2003, she decided to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in one year, while chronicling her travails on her blog. Now she has converted the tale of her adventures into book form: “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen” ($23.95, Little, Brown).

It’s a Herculean endeavor, and Ms. Powell plunges into it with wisecracking, misanthropic verve. By day, she’s working a thankless job, disillusioned about her place in life. By night, she’s a woman with a mission, and a growing audience of readers. But why Julia Child’s book? After all, as Ms. Powell herself admits, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” “hasn’t been on the must-have list for enterprising gourmets for decades.” But that’s why she’s drawn to it. As Ms. Powell writes, “Julia Child wants you – that’s right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end middle management job … to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright.”

Of course, it’s frustrating as hell. Ms. Powell starts out easily enough, with sauteed steak and boiled artichokes, but soon she’s in treacherous territory, struggling to halve marrowbones with a jigsaw, split a live lobster, rescue deflated ladyfingers. The frequent absurdity of classic French cooking is satisfyingly mocked and transcended.

This kind of culinary tomfoolery would soon curdle if not for Ms. Powell’s writing ability. She brilliantly plays the mad scientist to Child’s straight man. But ultimately, as the title indicates, it turns out that Julie and Julia are the perfect pair. Both have a piquant sense of humor, and both achieve fulfillment not only through cooking and eating, but through writing. Ultimately, the success of Ms. Powell’s blog led to publicity and a promising career as a writer. I wish Ms. Powell revealed more about this happy ending; there are no juicy details about how she managed to parlay her blog’s buzz into a bidding war and a six-figure book deal, for example. But what remains is a glorious mess to tuck into.

In “True Tuscan” ($24.95, Morrow), on the other hand, chef Cesare Casella cooks exactly what he wants – and seems to find an equal source of liberation. Tuscan food is known for its rustic simplicity, but Mr. Casella, the owner of the nouveau-Tuscan restaurant Beppe in Gramercy, brings a distinctly cowboyish independence of spirit to his native cuisine.

“True Tuscan” is packaged a bit misleadingly – the simple bunch of herbs on the cover and the subtitle, “Flavors and Memories From the Countryside of Tuscany,” seem to point to a basic exploration of Tuscan food. This book, however, is anything but austere. With influences that include his Ecuadorian cooks, other regions of Italy, and 15th-century Italian cookbooks, this is deeply personal Italian food. As Mr. Casella writes, “It’s about one Tuscan’s approach to the kitchen … mine.”

This fast-and-loose approach can be dangerous if a foolhardy chef is in the driver’s seat. But Mr. Casella exhibits a sure hand. Tuscan standards like chicken liver crostini get their due, but there are plenty of unexpected delights. Mr. Casella’s mother cooked Sicilian pasta norma for him as a child, so it’s in the book. Tuscan fried chicken sounds odd, until he points out that the Italians have always loved fried foods. His gamberoni alla moda della cucina, seasoned with hot sauce and cilantro, is inspired by his Ecuadorian cooks. There are frequent bursts of creativity, but they’re sensible ones – faro is cooked like risotto, and there’s a “Tuscan hummus” made from white beans.

Mr. Casella knows his Italian-food history, too, and lards the book with plenty of juicy insights. Black-eyed pea lasagna sounds like an absurd 21st-century invention, until the chef points out that black-eyed peas were common in Italy long before other beans arrived from the New World. He cooks sea bream with garlic and (gasp!) lemongrass, explaining that the Romans used the citrusy stalk as a flavoring in ancient times. Frittata con zoccole (frittata with “clogs”) is named after the slang term for the chunks of pancetta in the recipe.

But the recipes aren’t always easy to cook from. The Tuscan fried chicken recipe, for example, omits salt and pepper amounts, asking the reader to season raw chicken “to taste.” The chicken-liver crostini recipe calls for hard-to-find Tuscan bread without suggesting an alternative.

But these are small quibbles. The book is a treasure trove of earthy, smart Italian food. And if Mr. Casella is eager justify his unconventional approach, he needn’t be. Like Julie and Julia, he’s clearly found his own way.